"The demand side supplies itself"

Adriana Cronin-Lukas writes on Media Influencer about two guys that are promoting classical music by searching out rare Beethoven compositions and putting them up for download.

Link: Media Influencer: Music of the long tail

To me, this shows another crack in the traditional producer-distribution-audience models. It is obvious that scholars and professionals were not the audience. The two Beethoven enthusiasts were first doing what they wanted to enjoy and couldn't find and now they are hoping to reach the mainstream in a way academicians and virtuosos can't. As Doc Searls points out, this is the demand side supplying itself. Sure, enthusiasts and amateurs have achieved feats that impressed the official experts and professionals but now, thanks to an unparalled distribution system that the internet has become, they can go directly to the audience. Some consumer-generated content that is scaring those who grew comfortable with the model and the control it gave them.

She calls this "long tail for producers" because of the obscurity of the compositions in question. But I prefer to focus on another aspect of this phenomenon that she identifies above -- that of consumers producing their own content and thereby rejigging the producer-distributor-consumer model. The demand side can also supply itself in non-long tail situations.

I think this phenomenon also goes well beyond music. At the consulting firm where I work, we are working on a new way to think about the world. We call this the C2C Future. Consumers talk to each other. Companies co-opt them into the process of producing a product or service. Consumers get personalised offerings as a result. Increased value results, which, depending on the industry, is either captured by existing firms or by new start-ups or accrues directly to consumers themselves. These things apply to a lot of industries, not just music or media although those are obvious the first places to look.

(There are many other aspects of the C2C Future that I want to talk about but this isn't the place, and certainly not the time -- I'm going to bed!)

Comments

[Adriana]

Oh, absolutely it applies to areas other than music. I actually spend most of my time writing about exactly the dimension you mentioned. The Uncovered Beethoven was just a particularly clear cut example of that phenomenon.

But I do think that creating a space for companies to communicating with their customers in the existing corporate environment is an uphill struggle. The same activity works brilliantly in the blogosphere and my business is in extrapolating and translating the different motivation and dynamics from the online to the business world. The hardest thing is not the set up of any such communication but the change of attitude by companies...

[Murli]

Thanks for that comment.

What did you mean by "creating a space for companies to communicate with their customers"? Are you talking about novel PR strategies or about corporate blogs or maybe even about things like building one-to-one customer relationships?

I empathise with your comment about change of attitudes, but I guess that's why we consultants have jobs :-) As you imply, it's not the "solution" but the processes, cultural changes and all the rest that influence the success of the project, be it a strategy project or an IT project. We've all seen this happen often enough. :-)